Maybe this is a dumb question. But I'm going on my annual wikipedia dive on nuclear disasters.

If they built all of these like 500m below the surface and covered in heavy rocks or concrete/steel wouldn't most of the effects of a total melt down be contained by the ground?

It seems like the worst part of a subterainian melt down vs one on the surface is there is probably a mini earth quake in the area.But in my mind it seems most of the fallout and radiation would be contained, you only have to worry about ejected materials and chuncks i suppose?/And as long as your reactor isnt near any fault lines i dont see any real danger.

Also after a melt down it seems itwould be much easier to fix the problem if its in a giant hole in the ground vs sitting in the middle of a russian village.

>>79259The answer is threefold1.) Building nuclear reactors is already a tremendously hard undertaking2.) Building anything underground significantly increases the difficulty even if it is a normal structure3.) During the time period when nuclear reactors were conceptualized, popularized, and disseminated, few nuclear accidents had happened, and understanding of the risks was low. If you look at the actual technical details of what caused the chernobyl accident, it was phenomenally stupid, and this tremendous comedy of errors had to combine to allow it to happen.Combine all those with the fact that nuclear power proliferation was subsidized by governments as cold war proxies and its easy to see how cheap, easy, and fast outweighed safe, secure, and cautious.

In the future, we'll use thorium if we use nuclear reactors at all, so it's moot in general. Now we know better, but it won't do anything for all the reactors currently in the world, which were built when we didn't.

>>79262Absolutely, it definitely would, as long as you secured the water table. It would prevent atmospheric release of radiation, which was the main problem in the chernobyl disaster. However, the radiation would still be there, which means clean up after an accident would be basically impossible.

Also, be sure not to do it near any volcanoes or potential volcanoes. While the good news is throwing tons of radioactive stuff into the core of the earth won't hurt it (that's actually where the vast majority of our planet's radioactive isotope reserves are) but radioactive waste can survive the condition of being molten indefinitely, so even if there are nearby hot springs, that radiation could find its way back into the atmosphere in a dramatic way.

Is that possible? During a meltdown, underground might be immediately safer for the surrounding pop but a single earthquake might release that radiation at a later date. Perhaps in an area devoid of seismic activity you would find success.

The Canadian Shield forms the nucleus of North America and extends from Lake Superior on the south to the Arctic Islands on the north, and from western Canada eastward across to include most of Greenland.The Amazonian (Brazilian) Shield on the eastern bulge portion of South America. Bordering this is the Guiana Shield to the north, and the Platian Shield to the south.The Baltic (Fennoscandian) Shield is located in eastern Norway, Finland and Sweden.The African (Ethiopian) Shield is located in Africa.The Australian Shield occupies most of the western half of Australia.The Arabian-Nubian Shield on the western edge of Arabia.The Antarctic Shield.In Asia, an area in China and North Korea is sometimes referred to as the China-Korean Shield.The Angaran Shield, as it is sometimes called, is bounded by the Yenisey River on the west, the Lena River on the east, the Arctic Ocean on the north, and Lake Baikal on the south.The Indian Shield occupies two-thirds of the southern Indian peninsula.

It's a more advanced technology that isn't as fully developed, so everything about it costs more. And, even if it were at the same economy of scale, an individual unit of fuel costs more, since it must be transmuted from thorium to uranium first. The only savings are in safety and waste concerns, and those are long term costs which people like to ignore in favor of short term ones.

>>79276This is just my understanding, I could be wrong. It seems mainly because were stuck with the old reactors because they cost so much to build that we more or less have to use the old ones for a long time until they've paid for them selves or outlived their usefullness or economic sustainability.

Then also the whole industry is standardized around the old technology. So to switch to a new one would be like a major format shift that the entire industry would need to adapt to, and it just costs too much money.Also you would need to train a whole new generation of nuclear power plant operators on a new type of reacor. Where I imagine that most of the work is still on old reactors, why train for the new ones?

>>79265Power generation can't occur solely in one specific place. It's decentralized for a reason: power transmission is not an efficient process over massive amounts of distance. It's the same reason the old "why don't we just build massive solar arrays in the Sahara to power the world" trick won't work. It's not enough to generate the power, you have to wire it to the locations that consume power. Resistance, even for highly efficient conductors like copper wire, plays a big role in determining the power grid and its constituents.